Link Collection — May 12, 2013

• Obama orders agencies to make data open, machine-readable by default | Ars Technica

  good, but note the “if implemented”…
   
  “President Barack Obama issued an executive order today that aims to make “open and machine-readable” data formats a requirement for all new government IT systems. The order would also apply to existing systems that are being modernized or upgraded. If implemented, the mandate would bring new life to efforts started by the Obama administration with the launch of Data.gov four years ago. It would also expand an order issued in 2012 to open up government systems with public interfaces for commercial app developers.

  “The default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable,” the president’s order reads. “Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable.” The order, however, also requires that this new “default state” protect personally identifiable information and other sensitive data on individual citizens, as well as classified information.”

  tags: opendata US

• Will Your Golden Years Be Robot-Assisted?

  I’m totally counting on an eldercare robot, tho I might choose a name other than HERB:

  “Robots—in addition to other uses—are now being viewed as a way to meet the needs of a fast-growing aging population, with technologies that assist in daily care and provide companionship. Over  the next 18 years, 78 million baby boomers will turn 65 at a rate of about 8,000 a day. And most will not be able to afford the daily help often required by age-related disability.

  At the same time, health care costs are skyrocketing. Robots could help address both costs and manpower issues.”

  tags: robotics healthcare demographics

• Technology is a tool: We can print guns, but we can also print prosthetic limbs — Tech News and Analysis

  “The same week that brought us a video of someone firing a gun built using parts manufactured on a 3D printer, on Wednesday offered us an inspiring story about using the same type of printer to manufacture a prosthetic hand for more than hundred times less than the cost of a traditional prosthetic set of fingers.

  The story of the Robohand is as inspiring as an Oprah interview. One of the participants, however, noted that he didn’t intend to help those missing a limb. Instead, he sought out a 3D printed hand to save himself after a wood working accident shaved off four of his fingers. And yet, thanks to a collaboration between carpenter Richard Van As in Johannesburg, and a Seattle prop designer a five-year old born without fingers now has a more functional hand.”

  tags: 3dprinting robohand makerbot

• SAP Takes It All to the Cloud – NYTimes.com

  The inevitable: “We will do cloud-based ERP on a massive scale,” said Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP’s executive board and one of the people who oversaw the project. Of SAP’s regular product, he said, “At some point in the future, complex implementations should go away. All of our products are moving to HANA.”

  tags: SAP HANA cloud

• The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

  “Deep Learning is a first step in this new direction. Basically, it involves building neural networks — networks that mimic the behavior of the human brain. Much like the brain, these multi-layered computer networks can gather information and react to it. They can build up an understanding of what objects look or sound like.

  In an effort to recreate human vision, for example, you might build a basic layer of artificial neurons that can detect simple things like the edges of a particular shape. The next layer could then piece together these edges to identify the larger shape, and then the shapes could be strung together to understand an object. The key here is that the software does all this on its own — a big advantage over older AI models, which required engineers to massage the visual or auditory data so that it could be digested by the machine-learning algorithm.

  With Deep Learning, Ng says, you just give the system a lot of data “so it can discover by itself what some of the concepts in the world are.””

  tags: AI brain algorithm data Ng

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.